About Our Limits and Barriers
Posted by lemiffe in Communication, Life on Aug 12th, 2009 | 0 commentsEscape the barriers. Why is it that us, as human beings, many times are constricted to the walls our mind creates?
You see it everywhere. People locked within their social barriers. I am not talking about total loss of social control, nonetheless, I am talking about freedom of speech, and freedom of action, within respectable values, moral, and behaviour.
Us humans set limits for everything. For our thoughts, for our actions, for our writing, our drinking, our eating, and all sorts of things. While some of these limits are clearly good for our bodies, some of them do not exactly create a benefit for us. They create limitations as to how far we are willing to go, how to deal with certain situations, how to run our lives.
“Tories unveil NHS database plans” – BBC NEWS
Posted by lemiffe in Computers, Life, Security, Viruses on Aug 12th, 2009 | 0 commentsThe Conservatives have promised huge cost savings for the NHS by scrapping government plans for a central database of patient records. Proposals include electronic medical notes being stored locally by GPs and hospitals and patients having online access to their medical records.
IT firms such as Google or Microsoft could host the information.
But the government said the Conservatives’ plans raised concerns about patient confidentiality.
Confidentiality? Hmm… Well with the proper safety measures in place, this shouldn’t raise concerns. A central database for national healthcare records should have been a top priority years ago! Of course, taking into consideration the proper encryption of all files, it would be a great system! All patients should be able to access their healthcare records through a web portal, this information should be able to be updated by GPs, hospitals and all other healthcare institutions. Doing things this way would allow various good practices to take place:
- Detecting early and preventing widespread diseases by statistical analysis of information.
- Allowing to poll all citisens, retrieve feedback, and gather general information in an easy way.
- Establish better criteria to the flaws in the system, and address all issues to develop a better system.
The Tories are promising NHS trusts a choice of computer systems, rather than having a single one imposed.
Every patient would have a username and password and could update their records with information like blood pressure and cholesterol levels.
Shadow health minister Stephen O’Brien insisted these separate systems would be “inter-operable”, allowing information to be accessed in different locations.
He said: “You want to have your data held locally and that should be with the person you trust most in the health service, which will be your GP.”
Yes, this is a good thing. Every patient should have their username and password, but a “choice” of computer systems is not an option! Inter-operable or not, the more systems are in use, the greater the possibility is of there being flaws in the transmission of data, man-in-the-middle hacking/cracking attacks, and a whole lot of other possibilities.
A single well-founded, secure, national database should be established and maintained correctly to provide the NHS and goverment with a ride range of information assets useful to the patients, the GPs and the NHS in general.
Mr O’Brien told BBC Radio 4′s Today programme: “We want to give patients the ability to give themselves greater control over their information.”
He added: “If we hold the data locally it’s more likely to be protected than within this massive [NHS] database…
Saying that is like figuring out that your money is more protected locally than in a bank. There always exists a possibility of a breach of information, but having the information in one single place, using one single system, means more security. The possibility of a virus infecting or cracking into the computer of a GP is much higher than the hacking of a properly secured database in a wide set of well-protected linux servers with a properly maintained firewall. Sure, there’s always DDoS, but at least there is no information breach.
Facebook in challenge to Google – BBC News
Posted by lemiffe in Business, Communication, Computers, Entertainment, Internet, Society on Aug 11th, 2009 | 0 comments“Facebook was unable to acquire Twitter so this is the next best option,” said Ben Parr, associate editor of Mashable, a news blog covering social media.
“Google look out, Facebook knows the real money is in real-time search,” said respected blogger Robert Scoble.
“Google is the king of regular search. FriendFeed is the king of real-time search. This makes the coming battle over this issue much more interesting,” Mr Scoble told the BBC.
“FriendFeed is well known for having some powerful and intelligent technology that allows users to aggregate everything they do online and do it all in real time.
What does FriendFeed do?
- Friendfeed lets users bring together many of the accounts they have on social media and networking sites such as Facebook and Flickr
- Updates posted on those sites by a user and their friends are echoed on FriendFeed.
- A built in chat system lets FriendFeed users instantly comment or start a conversation about an update.
- These feeds of what friends are up to can be embedded in webpages or fed out to services such as Twitter.
- FriendFeed works with almost 60 sites including Delicious, Reddit, LinkedIn and NetVibes.
“With this acquisition, Facebook is gunning directly not only at Twitter, but at Google. This is a warning shot to those two companies,” Mr Parr told BBC News.
via BBC NEWS | Technology | Facebook in challenge to Google.
Twitter site reopens after attack – BBC News
Posted by lemiffe in Communication, Internet, Security on Aug 6th, 2009 | 0 commentsMicro-blogging service Twitter was taken offline for more than an hour on Thursday in what the company believes was a co-ordinated attack.
The popular site has been subject to a so-called denial-of-service attack, according to the firm’s official blog.
Denial-of-service attacks take various forms but often involve a company’s servers being flooded with data in an effort to disable them.
Facebook has also said it is “looking into” possible problems with its site.
via BBC NEWS | Technology | Twitter site reopens after attack.
In B Flat
Posted by lemiffe in Music on Aug 6th, 2009 | 0 commentsMy sister stumbled upon a very interesting website today, and so I would like to share this with my readers (and listeners).
This is a website related to music. In it, you have many videos available which produce sounds, and together, or one by one, create stunning music, in B flat.
I have to say, my utmost respect for those who created this, it is a brilliant experiment, and just stunning that you can play around with music all in one same scale in this way.
Check out the website right here: http://www.inbflat.net/
